Since I last wrote, I finished my summer research at Andrew Weaver’s lab (more on that in the weeks and months to come, as our papers work through peer review). I moved back home to the Prairies, which seem unnaturally hot, flat and dry compared to BC. Perhaps what I miss most is the ocean – the knowledge that the nearest coastline is more than a thousand kilometres away gives me an uncomfortable feeling akin to claustrophobia.

During that time, the last story I covered has developed significantly. Before September even began, Arctic sea ice extent reached record low levels. It’s currently well below the previous record, held in 2007, and will continue to decline for two or three more weeks before it levels off:

Finally, El Niño conditions are beginning to emerge in the Pacific Ocean. In central Canada we are celebrating, because El Niño tends to produce warmer-than-average winters (although last winter was mysteriously warm despite the cooling influence of La Niña – not a day below -30 C!) The impacts of El Niño are different all over the world, but overall it tends to boost global surface temperatures. Combine this effect with the current ascent from a solar minimum and the stronger-than-ever greenhouse gas forcing, and it looks likely that 2013 will break global temperature records. That’s still a long way away, though, and who knows what will happen before then?

La Niña is expected to continue into the winter. This is definitely not what southern U.S. states, such as Texas, want – after a summer of intense drought, the drying effect of La Niña on that area of the world won’t bring any relief.

For those of you going to AGU, an itinerary planner is now available to browse the program and save sessions you’re interested in. I am compiling an awesome-looking list of presentations by the likes of James Hansen, Wally Broecker and Gavin Schmidt. Our poster is entitled “The Software Architecture of Global Climate Models”, and is on the Thursday morning.

Has anyone read Earth, an Operator’s Manual by Richard Alley? If so, would you recommend it?

This is what the last few days have taught me: even if the code for climate models can seem dense and confusing, the output is absolutely amazing.

Late yesterday I discovered a page of plots and animations from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis. The most recent coupled global model represented on that page is CGCM3, so I looked at those animations. I noticed something very interesting: the North Atlantic, independent of the emissions scenario, was projected to cool slightly, while the world around it warmed up. Here is an example, from the A1B scenario. Don’t worry if the animation is already at the end, it will loop:

It turns out that this slight cooling is due to the North Atlantic circulation slowing down, as is very likely to happen from large additions of freshwater that change the salinity and density of the ocean (IPCC AR4 WG1, FAQ 10.2). This freshwater could come from either increased precipitation due to climate change, or meltwater from the Arctic ending up in the North Atlantic. Of course, we hear about this all the time – the unlikely prospect of the Gulf Stream completely shutting down and Europe going into an ice age, as displayed in The Day After Tomorrow – but, until now, I hadn’t realized that even a slight slowing of the circulation could cool the North Atlantic, while Europe remained unaffected.

Then, in chapter 8 of the IPCC, I read something that surprised me: climate models generate their own El Ninos and La Ninas. Scientists don’t understand quite what triggers the circulation patterns leading to these phenomena, so how can they be in the models? It turns out that the modellers don’t have to parameterize the ENSO cycles at all: they have done such a good job of reproducing global circulation from first principles that ENSO arises by itself, even though we don’t know why. How cool is that? (Thanks to Jim Prall and Things Break for their help with this puzzle.)

Jim Prall also pointed me to an HD animation of output from the UK-Japan Climate Collaboration. I can’t seem to embed the QuickTime movie (WordPress strips out some of the necessary HTML tags) so you will have to click on the link to watch it. It’s pretty long – almost 17 minutes – as it represents an entire year of the world’s climate system, in one-hour time steps. It shows 1978-79, starting from observational data, but from there it simulates its own circulation.

I am struck by the beauty of this output – the swirling cyclonic precipitation, the steady prevailing westerlies and trade winds, the subtropical high pressure belt clear from the relative absence of cloud cover in these regions. You can see storms sprinkling across the Amazon Basin, monsoons pounding South Asia, and sea ice at both poles advancing and retreating with the seasons. Scientists didn’t explicitly tell their models to do any of this. It all appeared from first principles.

Take 17 minutes out of your day to watch it – it’s an amazing stress reliever, sort of like meditation. Or maybe that’s just me…

One more quick observation: most of you are probably familiar with the naming conventions of IPCC reports. The First Assessment Report was FAR, the second was SAR, and so on, until the acronyms started to repeat themselves, so the Fourth Assessment Report was AR4. They’ll have to follow this alternate convention until the Eighth Annual Report, which will be EAR. Maybe they’ll stick with AR8, but that would be substantially less entertaining.

About

Kaitlin Alexander is a PhD student in climate science at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She became interested in climate science as a teenager on the Canadian Prairies, and increasingly began to notice the discrepancies between scientific and public knowledge on climate change. She started writing this blog at age sixteen to help address this gap in public understanding, and it slowly evolved into a record of her research as a young climate scientist. Read more

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